Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
I can tell that the current events are getting a bit overwhelming by the difficulty of writing about other topics here! I’m not specifically on a coronavirus topic today, but rather on what some of the news coverage is saying about our expectations for medical research. One of the things people have noted about my… Read More
I’m sitting in an MIT conference on AI in drug discovery/development as I write this. One of the speakers here (Mathai Mammen, J&J/Janssen) just made a good point – not a new one, but a solid one that deserves some thought. He called for “bilingual” people, by which he means people who have some fluency… Read More
Here’s a useful article that looks at the fate of university-licensed startup (ULS) life sciencecompanies over the last few years. There are more and more such companies (a greater than tenfold increase in their number since 1990), but a comprehensive look at success rates (and how such rates vary according to the universities involved) has… Read More
I enjoyed looking through the Nature Indexes section recently in that journal – I believe that they do this primarily as a way to make a new section in which to sell advertisements, to be honest, but the content itself is worth a look. They’re tracking publications in 82 leading scientific journals and looking for… Read More
Some thoughts this morning on universities and industry and their contributions to research – and for once, this isn’t going to be another long screed on drug research in particular. No, I’m particularly talking about what each of these brings to R&D in general, and about the places (both conceptual and physical) where they se… Read More
I had a book review recently in Nature, on a new volume (Thrifty Science) that looks over the history of early scientific experimentation from the viewpoint of its frugal nature – the idea of reusing and repurposing equipment, objects, and even rooms in one’s house. There was indeed a lot of this sort of thing… Read More
This fascinating article has nothing to do with drug discovery per se, but it has plenty to do with discovery itself. It’s a memoir of the author’s physicist grandfather, who believed while working at his job at Oak Ridge that he might have come across a big result in probability as related to quantum mechanics… Read More
Longtime medicinal chemist Mark Murcko has a Perspective article out in J. Med. Chem. on “What Makes a Great Medicinal Chemist“. As he makes clear from the beginning, if you’ve been doing this stuff for a while, you’ve likely heard many of these recommendations before. But it’s useful for people starting out, and it… Read More
Here’s an article at The Atlantic (via the Washington Monthly) that should concern anyone involved in R&D. It’s about the funding problems of many of the large public universities, particularly in the Midwest. Chemists will recognize several historically strong departments in that part of the country – but may also have noted… Read More
I really enjoyed this Curious Wavefunction post on being born at the right time. He uses the example of R. B. Woodward, who was several years older than most of the other big names from the glory days of synthetic organic chemistry (Corey, Stork, etc.), and had already had a chance to use his immense… Read More
